$10k for the most efficient instrument of existential risk reduction, the most efficient way to do good.

Is it true that people process things so differently? Or is it more of a subtle difference with overblown consequences? Can we change the bounds of the way we perceive?

I don't mean that I "feel the right move without reading". I mean that reading, for me, has a tactile rather than visual quality. When I imagine an extra stone on the board I don't see it.

Once I asked a friend of mine, who's a Go player like me, what "reading" felt like to him.

For those who don't know, "reading" is the term in Go for thinking through the consequences of a move before you make the move. There's a saying, "reading is the muscle of Go" - you can improve your play by having good heuristics and by memorizing some fixed patterns of play, but really good play requires being able to consider the state of play N moves ahead (depth), often for M possible variations (breadth).

My friend, it turns out, is a visual thinker. When he "reads" a Go sequence, he literally hallucinates stones in the appropriate positions; he sees them there. (The difficulty for him is to remember the various pictures.) I'm a "verbal thinker". (Actually verbal/kinesthetic.) I can stare at the Go board until my eyes bleed and never hallucinate a damn thing.

I have improved a lot at Go by solving small exercises, "tsumego" as they are called. The interesting thing is that I can now look at some non-trivial problems and instantly "spot" the right sequence (sometimes the correct answer plus several alternatives), but I still don't see a damn thing. The intersections don't light up with an overlay of imagined stones. It's more like I feel where the right answer is.

This is a mild disappointment, because one of the reasons I took up Go in the first place was to improve my visual thinking.

Just put $2K to the general fund.